Home owners often have a variety of machines and services for handling telephone functions such as answering machines or voice mail, caller ID, call waiting, three way calling, call forwarding, and voice dialing. Presently, these services are performed either by a variety of machines the user has to buy or by the telephony network or some combination of both. The customer is often confused by all these choices and machines. In addition, this disjointed approach does not allow the user to combine these functions, for instance a user cannot have selected incoming calls routed to his answer machine or voice mail. In addition, the present approach does not allow the user to combine his telephony services with his other communication services, such as the internet or television delivery services.
Thus there exists a need for a home gateway system with telephony functions that can integrate the functions of the various telephone services and machines and provides an intelligent interface to other communication services.